The Latest SPAC News and Rumors: October 26, 2022

Below is a daily summary of links to the latest SPAC news and rumors gathered across the web. 

Latest SPAC News: Saudi stock exchange CEO sees strong IPO pipeline, and Grove Collaborative products now available at more than 4,000 stores

Saudi stock exchange CEO sees strong IPO pipeline in busy year

The Middle East is having a banner year for IPOs on the back of high oil prices, investor inflows and strong demand for share sales. “What we’ve seen so far is great indications that this will not slow down in terms of pipeline,” Mohammed Al-Rumaih, CEO of the Tadawul stock exchange, said in an interview on the sidelines of Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh.

Special purpose acquisition company listings – which exploded on Wall Street at the height of the pandemic but have since largely fizzled out – are also on the bourse’s radar, Al-Rumaih said, while stressing that the timing of such a new product needs to be carefully planned.

Grove Collaborative products now available at more than 4,000 stores

Grove Collaborative (NYSE:GROV) products are popping up in stores all across the US, and two new retailers, Harris Teeter and H-E-B, are now stocking Grove Co., its sustainable home care brand.

Grove Collaborative is a leading sustainable consumer products company and Certified B Corp, and merged with Virgin Group Acquisition Corp. II, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company, earlier this year.

This expansion is the latest distribution landmark for the company, following its recent expansions into CVS, Kohl’s, Meijer and Giant Eagle, as well as increasing its range that is available at Target.

Big Four Shunned SPAC IPOs But Now Flock to Audit New Companies

When SPACs became Wall Street’s favorite way to take companies public, the Big Four accounting firms steered clear, leaving audit work to smaller outfits churning out hundreds of fast, cheap audits of the blank-check vehicles.

For those freshly minted public companies that emerged from the boom, it’s been a different story. The largest firms — Deloitte & Touche LLP, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, KPMG LLP, Ernst & Young LLP and their affiliates— audit almost two-thirds of the approximately 330 companies that went public through special purpose acquisition companies since 2020 and are still trading today, according to Bloomberg data. EY and its affiliates lead the Big Four in the de-SPAC client market, with 65 companies that went public via SPAC on its roster.

Regulatory challenges to allowing SPAC IPOs in Indonesia 

Regardless of the benefits that a SPAC provides, the current regulatory framework in Indonesia presents several regulatory challenges that will need to be addressed before SPAC IPOs (and de-SPAC) can be implemented in Indonesia.

An important provision under the Indonesian Company Law that needs to be observed concerns merger requirements. The law requires a joint merger plan document to include, among other things, the financial report of each merging company for the past three years. This is quite different from an acquisition transaction, where the law only requires the latest financial report of each of the acquiring and target companies.